Jalen Rose: Help Me Help Kids Get An Education

After 13 NBA seasons, Jalen Rose wanted to use his celebrity, considerable income from the NBA and his commitment to helping youth to uplift his hometown of Detroit. To that end, the former baller, now an NBA analyst for ESPN co-founded a charter school, the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy in Detroit.

It opened in 2011, with an initial enrollment of 120 ninth graders, it is tuition-free and partnered with the University of Detroit Mercy. The Jalen Rose Leadership Academy features an extended school day and a longer school year.

“We’re committed to give a quality public education to young men and young women whose families can’t afford for them to go to private school or even move to communities where the schools get more funding,” Rose told The Tom Joyner Morning Show. “For example, if you live in West Bloomfield, a student in public education gets over 10,000 per.

In Detroit, it’s $7200 per. Do the math. That’s why we don’t have the state of the art facilities I’m trying to establish and that’s why we have an inequity with those that are trying to compete with their counterparts in the suburbs. “